I said that that was nice, and we had a fine night together.
Then, the next day, I found another new girl waiting in the bedroom. I soon discovered that over half of my household was scheduled to leave soon, and that in a few months, they would start having difficulty finding replacements. I decided, what the heck? The place didn’t really need a hundred and fifty women to keep it up. Thirty or forty of them could handle things (and me) well enough.
Ian was having similar experiences. It seemed that since we were no longer necessary for the continuation of the culture, our previously infinite sex appeal was starting to wear a little thin.
Barbara’s depression didn’t wear thin. Instead, it got worse. Much worse. In a few weeks, she became impossible for anyone to talk to, and the Head Chef, a woman named Julia, started taking over most of her duties.
Barbara stopped spending her days with me, as well.
I was making some progress with my boys, but it was slow going. Scuba diving and flying ultralights still frightened them, but we often went horseback riding now.
But I couldn’t get them to race each other on horseback. The closest they got to it was galloping three abreast across the fields, like an old-time cavalry charge. That gave me an idea. I had uniforms made up for the four of us, the infinitely flashy outfits worn by the ancient Polish Winged Hussars, complete with golden helmets, leopard skin sashes, scale mail breastplates, sabres, and long lances. Plus, of course, the great feathered white wings going from their backs to high above their heads. Then I found a Killer corporal who had actually served in the Winged Hussars in the early fifteenth century. He showed up in full regalia—just Absolute Panache—to give them some pointers. The boys actually got fairly good with those long, hollow lances, skewering brass rings at a full gallop, but when it came to using a sabre, well, they just couldn’t bring themselves to swing one at somebody.
Often, the four of us went sailing. I tried to talk the boys into each taking one of the three yachts, using their servants as a crew, and racing each other, but they didn’t want to. They prefered to work together, as a team. Turning them into individuals was going to take time.
One night, at the Bucket of Blood, I got to talking to Leftenant Fitzsimon.
“Look, Fitz, you are a multiply married man, with lots of kids. You have more experience with children than I’ll ever have. I’ve told you the kind of problems I’ve been having with my boys. What am I doing wrong?”
“Wrong, sir? Why, nothing that I can see. Look. A boy needs a mother who loves him no matter what, and a father who spends enough time with him to show him what being a man is all about. See that he gets those two things, and enough to eat, and he’ll grow up all right. But I get the feeling that that’s not exactly what you want. You want those boys to grow up like twentieth-century Midwestern Americans, and there’s only one way to do that. You’ll have to take them to twentieth-century America, say, about 1945, a healthy, peaceful time, really, although it didn’t seem that way to the people who lived there. Raise them in the American Midwest, and they’ll grow up to be just like you. I mean, if you raise them in Inca Land, they’ll grow up being good little Incas, if you get my meaning.”
“But how can I do that? My job is here.”
“You can do what I do, sir, if your wife will go along with it. Spend your working life whereever the job takes you, and spend your vacations with your boys and their mother. Do it right and they won’t even be aware of the fact that you spend most of your time elsewhere.”
“But don’t you see, my wife is my biggest problem! She is a Smoothie who considers herself to be a murderer, and I’m beginning to realize that Smoothies have a bigger guilt complex than anything a Pagan or a Jew or a Catholic ever suffered from.”
“Sir, it sounds to me like the two of you are in need of professional help. You need a psychologist from your own American culture, and there’s only one of them on the whole island. He’s a friend of yours.”
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
A Talk With Hasenpfeffer
I mulled it over for weeks, and in the end I knew that Fitzsimmon was right. I had to talk with Hassenpfeffer. Still, I procrastinated until one day Barbara was gone. She simply could not be found anywhere on the island.
Frantic, I called together the three Killer officers who had helped me back when we thought that somebody might be sabotaging our first time canister.
“Find her,” I told them. “Find Barbara.”
“Right, sir,” Leftenant Fitzsimmon said. “We’ll be back directly, I expect.”
They all returned to my living room in five minutes.
“Yes?”
“She’s left, sir. She went back to 1965, when the local time transports were first put in. She went directly to the harbor and talked her way onto a freighter that had just delivered a load of building materials here. She sailed off with them, sir, headed for New Orleans.”
“Well, stop her! Get her back here!”
“Yes sir, if that’s what you really wish. But have you thought it all the way through? Do you really want us to have a military squad waiting for her when that ship docks in New Orleans? What if she doesn’t want to go back? Should we force her to come with us? What should our response be with regards to the local people and authorities? To them, this might look like a kidnapping, and then the use of force would seem appropriate to them. When that happens, do we fight back?”
“Oh, how the hell should I know? Why can’t you stop her before she gets on that ship?”
“Causality again, sir. You see, the three of us have watched her get on the ship and sail off. Not directly, but through the means of certain surveillance devices available to us. Anyway, her sailing off is now an established fact, and there’s no way in the world to change that.”
“Shit. Just what kind of surveillance devices are you talking about?”
“Right. Well, there isn’t any reason to keep anything from you anymore, is there? We use these ‘bugs’ that actually look like insects. They can crawl, fly, and have enough intelligence to follow their target at a discreet distance. They have enough sensors to observe everything that happens and enough memory to record about six hours of it. Then they fly home, and let you see what they saw.”
“Are these some kind of living thing, or a sort of tiny robot?”
“As I understand it, they are somewhere in between, sir.”
“Then how can what a machine knows stop you from doing anything?”
“Well, we know it too, sir, now that we’ve looked at what it saw. But their very act of recording it makes the event immutable. If we were investigating a murder, for example, and there was a dead body on the floor, we could bug the place, and find out exactly what happened there. We could prove conclusively who did the killing, and have a one hundred percent expectation of bringing him to justice. But we couldn’t do a thing for the victim of the crime, except avenge him, of course.”
“Well, damn causality!”
“I’ve often felt that way myself, sir. But for now, may I point out that the events we are talking about happened many years in the past? That you have plenty of time to think everything through, before you take any action? Time enough, say, to discuss the matter with your oldest friends and business partners?”
I sat there a while, thinking. “Yeah. I suppose you’re right. Okay. Thank you, gentlemen for another job well done.”
Ian was getting more and more involved with his Historical Core, to the point that it was difficult to get him to talk about anything else.
Anyway, I had a people problem, and only one person I knew of had the expertise to help me. I asked my secretary to make me an appointment to see Hasenpfeffer.
He said that he’d be right over.
In ten minutes, he was in my living room. He was much older than when I’d seen him last, and he had shrunk, somehow. His hair, what there was left of it, was grey turning to white. His skin was a bright, untanned pink, and there were crow’s feet around his clear blue eyes. More importantly, he seemed to have mellowed out with age, with a steady, sincere smile on his lips and in his eyes.
“Come in,” I said. “Have a seat. Can I get you anything?”